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Congressman Says Hacker Sent Lewd Photo Using His Name

Representative Anthony D. Weiner, one of the most prolific users of social media among politicians, said his Twitter account was hacked this weekend when someone sent out a lewd photograph under his name to a young woman in Seattle.

The episode unfolded Saturday night when it was reported on the Web site biggovernment.com, run by the conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart. It played out all day Sunday on the Internet, with Mr. Weiner, a Democrat who represents part of Brooklyn and Queens, addressing the matter on his own Twitter and Facebook accounts, and with bloggers from the left and the right arguing about whether this might be the start of a scandal or an example of how easy it is for political rivals to harm each other’s reputations using new technologies.

“Anthony’s accounts were obviously hacked,” Dave Arnold, a spokesman for Mr. Weiner, told The Associated Press. “He doesn’t know the person named by the hacker, and we will be consulting on what steps to take next.”

Biggovernment reported that a sexually suggestive photograph of a man in underwear, shown only from the waist down, was sent to the woman in Seattle from Mr. Weiner’s Twitter account.

“We’ve protected her name and her account, which was at one time verified to be active but has since been deleted after the photo in question was deleted,” biggovernment wrote. “Coincidentally, the rest of the photos in the congressman’s alleged yfrog account were also deleted around 11 p.m. Eastern.”

He told the Web site Politico that his account had been hacked by someone who sent the photo under his Twitter and yfrog names to the woman in Seattle, one of his followers on Twitter.

“The weiner gags never get old, I guess, ” he said in an e-mail to Politico.

A woman sent a statement to The Daily News that said she was the one who had received the photo and that she had never met Mr. Weiner, though she did follow him on Twitter. She also said that since the matter was made public, she has tried to delete her social media connections because she and her family have been hounded by media and bloggers wanting to know more about her.

“This is the reality of sharing information online in the 21st century,” she said in the statement. “Things that I never imagined people would care about are now being plastered all over blog sites, including pictures of me from when I was 17 and tweets that have been taken completely out of context. I tweeted once (it was reported that I said it twice) that ‘I wonder what my boyfriend @RepWeiner is up to.’ ”

A version of this article appears in print on May 30, 2011, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Congressman Says Hacker Sent Lewd Photo Using His Name. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe